‘When you . . . didn’t play . . . it was like a confirmation.’ She rubbed her eye. ‘Of . . . Oh, I don’t know. I’m sorry. Excuse me.’
He waited.
‘You must think I’m very intrusive.’ She smiled courageously.
He shrugged. ‘No.’
‘You see, my mother was a pianist. We listened to your records all the time. My father took me to your concerts in Berlin. There was always music in the house. When Mother died we’d play her favourite records. She listened to your Kreisleriana, and your Brahms violin sonatas with Wolfram Eckert, and so my family was always passionate about your records, and when my mother died, so united by them.’
Ursula smiled again with the relief of confession.
He pulled himself up a little, almost to displace his embarrassment. Ursula’s declaration filled him with humility. What she told him explained a great deal.
‘My father is still alive,’ she added. ‘He’s a novelist, actually. Diederich Kaustner.’
Philip inhaled deeply, feeling the wine strike at his tiredness. He sat in the chair for a while, wondering what to say. He frowned, touched his forehead delicately. Ursula’s solicitude was so penetrating. ‘I reminded you of your brother?’
She looked at him in pity. ‘Because you lost your mother?’
He smiled to cover his unease. She was being so distressingly sympathetic. ‘I never knew my real mother. For all I know she may be alive.’
‘Then you lost having a mother.’
For a moment he sensed the inscrutability of his own feelings. ‘She was Irish.’
‘Your mother?’
He managed to sit up a little. He sipped at his wine and cleared his throat. He was suddenly overcome with the crushing sense of what he had thrown away last night - his reputation, his entitlement to respect. He had abandoned his audience at the height of their expectation.
‘Your mother was Irish?’
‘An Irish nurse,’ he managed. ‘She worked in a hospital in Manchester. I was the result of a broom-cupboard romance that may have been one fuck long.’
He had no idea why he was telling her this. There seemed a need to offer something in return.
‘You were adopted?’
‘By a grammar-school teacher and his wife. Few years ago I tried to trace my mother through an agency. No luck. My father lives in Australia. He was a consultant eye surgeon until quite recently. I wrote to him for the first time when I was thirty-five suggesting we meet up. He replied saying that he had his own family who knew nothing about me, and didn’t think it was wise.’
She nodded carefully. ‘Were you disappointed?’
‘I never expected love. What . . . depressed me was the lack of curiosity.’
‘Did he know of your success?’
‘I didn’t want that to be his reason for seeing me.’
‘And your adoptive parents?’
‘I loved them and they did everything to support my music and to help me get on. They’re both dead, but I think of them a lot. I held on to their house for a few years after they died, then sold it and put the money in high-tech stocks. Lost everything, actually.’
There was a long interval of silence. Philip gazed at the floor.
‘D’you feel cheated of your birthright? A parent’s love?’
He gazed at her intently. She wanted to know the givens. He could tell her the givens, but from what standpoint do you evaluate a life that has been the only one possible for you?
‘Whether and how I feel it, I don’t know. My destiny was to become a pianist, and almost everything about that destiny means a life outside normal human relations. But yes, one craves normality. Music is very rewarding, and one leaps into it, but when I see happy families, happy parents, happy children, I wonder what it would have been like to be unexceptional, and tied into life in the usual way. Music abducted me at an early age. It takes over your mind, your body. My closest allies were dead composers. My fantasy life a score. To say I was lonely is untrue. I was dangerously self-sufficient. To have a raison d’etre at the age of seven is quite something. The child is suddenly partaking in a grown-up mental world, though what happens to the child in all this, I don’t know.’
Ursula nodded. She passed a hand inside the lapel of her jacket and eased it over her shoulder and arm. With a neat shrug she released the other shoulder and arm. Her coils of hair sprang loose and she had to tame it with her fingers, drawing it back around her ears, flicking it off her collar. She wore a gypsy-style shirt with puff sleeves and bare arms; a necklace of beads and a silver bracelet.
He saw shapely arms, fine wrists. He was aware of her breasts in the contours of her shirt. Ursula had flamenco possibilities in the line of her neck and shoulders.
She recollected the wine glass, ran its stem between her fingers. She looked suddenly thoughtful.
‘Why are you so miserable?’ she said.
He looked at her in surprise.
‘Something has happened?’
He reached for the wine bottle, topped up his glass.
She regarded him with contemplative intensity, as if divining something.
He actually found it impossible to speak. To begin to explain was to head off in a direction he could not face. He could hardly describe, let alone define, and just to make the attempt was somehow to parade so much vulnerable feebleness that he would rather it stayed trapped inside him. As he sat there, biting his lip, staring blankly at her bare foot, which had discarded its shoe and risen on to the sofa, he felt the old resentment growing - against his weaker self - that he could not share these thoughts with another person and satisfy her sympathy.
‘Konstantine Serebriakov was there last night,’ she said.
‘What!’
‘In the audience.’
‘No!’
‘With Arthur England and Jean Rose. John spotted them.’
Philip smothered his face in shame.
She was dismayed by his reaction, watched him closely.
‘Apparently, he’s very ill.’
He massaged his eye-sockets, defeated by this latest news.
‘People were moved by your speech. Everybody is desperately concerned about you. There’s no shame, Philip.’
With a sudden burst of energy he ejected himself out of his chair. ‘I’m holed beneath the water-line,’ he said brightly.
‘Why?’
Her look held a quality of sympathetic overflow, of ready amazement, showing the depth of her talent for dramatic participation. He faced Ursula, looking down at her as she gazed up at him, and saw in her lovely face the expression of a woman who could generate the most turbulent excitement from her body, whose bare arms and neck were maddeningly responsive to touch, whose high-strung sensitive involvement derived from a physical intensity of being.
He turned away, compressing the idea into a tight corner of his mind. He steadied himself at the mantelpiece.
Philip waited. A special effort was required, which he could barely bring himself to make. He sensed that she was giving him an opportunity. ‘Two years ago I split up with a girlfriend. Laura. She wanted to marry.’
Ursula looked up at him.
‘Anyway . . . um . . . anyway, we keep in touch. She told me recently that an old girlfriend of mine got pregnant as our relationship was ending, and had a termination.’ He looked down. ‘How did she find out? Don’t know. Why did she tell me? No idea. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind.’
He was adrift for a moment.
‘I felt that in ending that baby Camilla was somehow terminating me. Another generation of Morahans stymied, as though we’re not wanted in the world.’ He managed to look at her directly. ‘Me or my child.’
She nodded carefully. ‘Why can’t you have a child with someone else?’
He was almost amused.
‘If that’s what’s missing in your life!’
‘There speaks a twenty-six-year old.’
She frowned at this tack.
; ‘I’m a knackered old bachelor, Ursula.’
‘Bachelors are supposed to have fun.’
‘What you don’t know about men of my age!’
‘I like men your age.’
‘God, you’re charitable.’
‘I’m not being kind.’ She moved her bottom, looked at him levelly.
Philip reached for the wine glass. He could not conceive that Ursula was flirting with him.
‘If a man my age is single, there’s usually a good reason.’
‘Maybe you haven’t met the right person.’ She looked at him innocently.
Philip felt more alert now. He took a sip from his glass.
‘One needs talent, I think, to spot the right person.’
‘And a passionate nature, which you have.’
He looked at her suspiciously.
‘Oh, come on, Philip! It’s not that difficult, making babies. Falling in love.’
‘Relationships can be difficult.’
‘But is that destiny or luck?’
He smiled. ‘In my case incompetence.’
‘You want freedom, but you need love. There’s got to be a way.’
He raised his eyebrows. How simple life could look from the twenty-six-year-old end of the telescope.
‘Can I tell you something?’ he said, after a moment.
She smiled.
‘About something else?’
‘Don’t be too defensive,’ she said.
‘I’m not being defensive. I’m changing the subject.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
He decided to ignore this. He looked at her for a moment. She leaned across a pile of cushions, legs curled up.
‘The other week, I had a student here. Girl from the Academy. I try not to have students in the house because they chatter away and you can’t get rid of them. She was Russian. Twenty-two or -three. She played the Funeral March Sonata. The piece I was supposed to play last night. When I heard what she did with it I couldn’t speak afterwards. It was quite overwhelming.’ He grimaced in recollection. ‘Chopin wrote the march itself in 1836. The plight of Poland, the death of his sister. He had enough good reasons to pen a funeral march. Two years later he and George Sand went to Majorca for some sun, but he got bronchitis and started coughing blood and only just survived. Back in France he composed three further movements around the funeral march: the Opus 35 Sonata. Well, I knew all this, but I had always seen the work as a young man’s measuring up to death, with a touch of Gothic rhetoric. A walk around the graveyard, not a flop into the coffin. When the Russian girl started I had the sensation of actually being Chopin and feeling what I can only describe as terror. You see, when Chopin was in Valdemosa, I’m sure he thought he would die. And though he survived, he had the taste of death in his mouth. The whole sonata is his creative struggle with the memory of that abyss. I think he realised that he’d written a funeral march for himself. It was an unconscious musical premonition that became, in Majorca, almost a reality. With a terrible insight. Because after the funeral march, what comes next? A return to life, spring? Some ethereal threnody conducting us to a place of peace? Not for Chopin. What you hear in the last movement is the absolute end. A soundworld beyond human life. The unspooling of consciousness itself.’
He looked away. He was now ready to make a declaration. He felt somehow stronger as he spoke the words.
‘An unwelcome elegy for the death of an unborn child, I thought. It reminded me of something known for a while but not yet felt. When I die there will be nothing left of me, nothing that precedes or succeeds me. No parents or siblings or cousins. No wife and children. I am the beginning and end of the line. Anticipated by nothing. Returning to nothing.’
He gazed into the mirror above the mantelpiece, saw his reflection, saw Ursula’s.
She held his eye as he looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her expression seemed unfamiliar, as though the reversed image of her face in the mirror showed another self.
He looked darkly at her. She was being drawn into the contradictory world of his mind, a place where external reality is alternately overpowering and non-existent.
Slowly he came back to the armchair. After a moment he sat down. The wine, as he sipped it, tasted strange.
She remained still. She had the look of a person whose role is to wait and to listen.
Philip allowed the silence to play out. He feared that his candour would be alienating. He was not an easy man to reassure. He regarded Ursula with sympathy. Her revered pianist was in dire form today.
‘Why can’t you have children?’ she asked.
‘Oh, that again.’
‘Because you can’t fall in love any more?’
He stared at her.
‘This Laura. You weren’t in love with her?’
‘She says I’m a claustro-agoraphobic. Can’t bear to be alone. Can’t tolerate intimacy.’
‘Isn’t playing the piano all about love in some way?’
‘It’s all about everything.’
‘When you can do it?’
‘I play the piano to move myself, Ursula. The audience attends, and hopefully the audience is also moved. Human love is a matter of practical compromises and sharing. It’s a loving enterprise that delimits artistic freedom unless your partner is a doormat, and God knows there are some. So you make a choice between going it alone and harming no one - what I’ve done - or inflicting your inability to compromise on a partner, which seems selfish. Or you give into the demands of marriage and parenthood and become a more connected human being and less yourself. Good for partners and children. Bad for your art.’
‘What about the heart, Philip? The heart needs sustenance. How can you be human and cut out tenderness and passion and all the bonds that enable people to be happy and to care about each other?’
‘Classical music doesn’t come from happiness. So much of it is so fundamentally tragic.’
‘But this musician,’ she burst out, ‘can’t play the piano any more. The romantic artist hero has gone on strike! If music is the great love of your life, you’ve just been dumped. What now?’
He glanced away.
‘You’re miserable,’ she said, ‘because you need more of life and a lot less of art. Music has dried you up in some way. I don’t believe this emotional current you’re talking about stems from turning your back on other people . . .’
‘ I don’t . . .’
‘If music is about everything, it’s about everything in life!’
He covered his brow, as though she were striking him.
‘You need to live a little, Philip. The piano is part of something much larger. You have to find a reason for living beyond all this.’ She gestured at the shelves of music.
He regarded her with tense admiration. Ursula’s appearance belied her true nature. The collapsible lissomness of legs and shoulders, the fine eyes were upstaged by her rigorous certainty, which somehow sidelined the feminine.
He shook his head. ‘What do you recommend then?’
She shrugged. ‘Very easy. Cancel the series.’
‘Cancel the series?’
‘Postpone Bulmanion.’
‘This is my agent speaking?’
‘Put everything on ice.’
He was amused. ‘And do what?’
‘Time out. Find yourself away from music.’
‘I have commitments . . .’
‘Escape everything to do with music.’
‘And then?’
She smiled brilliantly, almost teasingly. ‘Have a romance.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Food, sex, travel.’
‘You have a touching faith in my . . .’
‘ I honestly believe a good woman will sort you out.’
He blinked. ‘I’d like to find a good woman.’
‘Many fish in the sea.’
‘Very helpful of you, Ursula.’
‘I believe in keeping my clients happy.’
‘Thank you for your profes
sional attention.’
‘My pleasure.’ She gave him a half-humorous look and tossed the hair off her face.
She ran a fingernail over her knee, finessing her composure in a new position on the recamier, which produced more leggy slants and the roll of her hip.
Philip maintained a look of introspection whilst allowing his mind to be compressed by the alien notion that Ursula might find him attractive because of his fame or artistry or the residue of some teenage crush garnered at a concert when he was ten years younger and which somehow still flickered on in her head despite his present state. The idea was incongruous and not to be dwelt on, and probably deluded because how could a woman of her opportunities feel anything more than respect for a man of his age? He was not a sexual player any more, not in his own mind. Ever since Laura, he had censored the idea of another relationship; if that one had failed, it was impossible to imagine another could succeed. Certainly he was inhibited by a fear of repeating the past, inflicting disappointment on somebody new and loathing on himself.
He waved it away, as if to release himself from her attention.
‘You get off the train at my stage of life, you might never get back on.’
She gave him a look of pert reproval. ‘The train’s already crashed.’
‘Well . . .’
‘Regenerate, Philip. Get on another one. A better one.’
He leaned forward, setting his glass down. ‘Where did they teach you this happy-clappy born-again guide to mid-life crisis?’
‘We don’t have time to be depressed.’ She almost smirked. ‘We barely have time to sleep!’
‘Prozac and Viagra. That’s your philosophy, I take it.’
‘No!’
‘Life is short and shitty, so let’s party and laugh.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘If I knew how to regenerate, I would. Yeah, sure, fool around like some menopausal twit desperately clutching at the wisps of lost youth. Take a holiday in Florence, coming to terms with middle age over the crossword puzzle and a glass of Chianti. Read pop psychology and self-help manuals to get in touch with my inner fluffy bunny.’
The Concert Pianist Page 9